"Tens of thousands of large dams across the globe are reaching the end of their expected lifespans, leading to a dramatic rise in failures and collapses, a new UN study finds. These deteriorating structures pose a serious threat to hundreds of millions of people living downstream."
"Who would want to live downstream of the 125-year-old Mullaperiyar Dam, nestled in a seismic zone of the Western Ghats mountains in India? The 176-foot-high relic of British imperial engineering cracked during minor earthquakes in 1979 and 2011. According to a 2009 study by seismic engineers at the Indian Institute of Technology, it might not withstand a strong earthquake larger than 6.5 on the Richter scale.
Three million people live downriver of the dam. But their demands for it to be emptied are held up by a long-running legal case in the nation’s Supreme Court between Kerala, the state under threat, and Tamil Nadu, the state upstream that operates the dam to obtain irrigation water and hydropower.
Or how about living below the Kariba Dam, built by the British on the Zambezi River in Southern Africa 62 years ago? Back then, it was seen as Africa’s equivalent of the Hoover Dam. But in 2015, engineers found that water released through its floodgates had gouged a hole more than 260 feet deep in the river bed, causing cracks and threatening to topple the concrete dam, which is 420 feet high and holds back the world’s largest artificial lake."
Fred Pearce reports for Yale Environment 360 February 3, 2021.
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